On Monday, September 14, I received a late morning call from Cap Sante neighbors that they had a Barred owl on their property.  I grabbed by camera and hustled over to find a Barred owl in full view.  As we watched the owl flew to a patch of ground cover near the window, snatched a mouse and then flew to a different limb to devour the creature in a single gulp… which is why we have owl pellets.  Fifty-eight photos later I had all the owl photos I could use for the morning.

At one point when the owl changed perches we saw the wings of another bird flash and we discovered it was an accipiter that briefly harassed the owl.

I arrived back home and glanced out the window at my watercourse just in time to see a pair of Yellow-rumped warblers (Audubon race) so I grabbed my camera again.  They were gone by the time I got outside but I decided to wait awhile.  Eventually a Golden-crowned kinglet showed up at the watercourse.  Bird Notes, on NPR’s nMorning Edition, recently noted that these birds migrate not north and south but between elevations, with the birds breeding at the higher elevations during the spring and summer and returning to the lower elevations for the winter.  The birds only began arriving back at my house (at roughly 100′ elevation!) in the past week or so.

Being a very early riser I was seriously in need of a nap, but yard activity was interesting enough to delay the nap for a little longer.  I was glad I did because the next interesting bird to enter the yard was a Hermit’s thrush, a bird that I might not see in a year of birding, especially in our yard.  I think I remember seeing one on the Cap Sante Overlook early last spring, but I was unable to obtain a photo at the time.